


when the dreaming was done

by beverytender



Series: Arya x Gendry Week 2018 [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: AryaxGendry Week, Canon - Book, F/M, Gen, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 05:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15406344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beverytender/pseuds/beverytender
Summary: Gods, he doesn't even know how many years it's been since he lost her.





	when the dreaming was done

He can’t remember the first time he laid eyes on her. Not precisely, not clearly - for all his blustering ‘do you think I’m as stupid as the rest of them,’ she had blended in well, for a while. That haunts him. More even than having known and lost her, more than the guilt, or the horror, about what could have, may have, happened to her since. More than how much more useless, unnecessary, unimportant he feels now that he knows what it feels like to have been useful, necessary, important to her. More than any of that. It haunts him how easy it would have been to have missed the opportunity to know her at all.

Or perhaps he’s just distracting himself from how awful all the rest of it feels by thinking about how awful it would’ve been to just overlook her.

Course it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference either way now. It’s just variety in the way he tortures himself. If she’s alive, which he cannot bring himself to think otherwise, he can’t, he can’t, gods willing, she’s so fucking far from this shithole of a country that it never even crosses her mind. Gods willing, she doesn’t remember it at all, not him, not any of the shit that - 

He should hope for that. That she got to leave it all behind. He can add that to the ways he can make himself guilty, he thinks, not at all bitter. He can’t even hope she got to forget all the horrors she’s seen, been through, because the thought she might not remember him…

Jeyne was right. He only ever gets angrier on nights like this, when the wolfsong starts so damned early and he can’t help himself but sit outside too long, well into the cold, and drink, and hope, and feel guilty in equal measure, each feeling as bad as the one before, because what right does he have to feel anything about her, even now?

And even still, knowing that, acknowledging that, it’ll be hours still before he gives it up, goes in, and he won’t sleep tonight even when he does.

~

There are mornings she can’t recall why she’s on this ship. Days she can’t recall her destination, where or when she boarded, let alone why. She knows it was important, vital, the why, and that only makes it worse. The best she can do, those days, is cling to the rail, waiting for anything familiar, trying to distract herself by carefully cataloguing everything she feels, with no idea why or even why it seems, all at once, a victory and a vicious defeat to feel any of this, anything, at all.

The days she can remember are barely better. She does not cling to the railings, those days. The remembering hurts, mayhaps in a distinctly opposite way than the not knowing, but pain all the same as it comes back, in trickles and floods, and she is out of practice entirely with coping with this sort of pain. She has no control over it, remembering, and the images, the names, they come in fits and starts, sometimes comforting but more often worse than any blow she’s ever received. Half the time she can’t even make sense of it, nothing comes in any sort of order she can make out. There’ll be a name but not a face, or a voice but the words indistinct, and she cannot tell if she’s putting all the bits together properly, but she is to her bones certain that even when she does recall her destination, there will be no one there to tell her.

It is an awful thing, knowing you’re alone when you can barely name who you’ve lost, and so those days she stays in her cabin because she cannot be certain the temptation to pitch herself over the railing will not overpower her.  
~

He has ceased leaving the forge at all on the nights the wolves can be heard.

~

She cannot remember, the day the ship docks. The captain sees everyone off, and when it’s her turn, he looks at her like she’s mad. She can’t argue with that assessment, although something in her rejects it. Perhaps she should know him, but his face means nothing, and there isn’t that undercurrent of uncertainty that grips her sometimes, when certain eyes catch hers or certain figures, far off, draw her attention. What’s more this is no sense of loss, when she disembarks, and she can recall that many times over even on the bad days, now.

She feels no familiarity, once she’s on land, no matter how she tries, standing there on the dock, in the way, for who knows how long. Eventually, she gives up, picks a direction and simply walks. It’s a week, at least, before she remembers anything again, and by then she has no idea where she is for a different reason, so she just keeps walking. It feels good, or at least, better, to be moving, on her own steam, even unsure of her location or how long it’ll take to get there or - 

Well, if she thinks about it beyond that, it stops feeling better, so she doesn’t.

~ 

The wolves are gone.

It takes him a fortnight to realize that he hasn’t had cause to work through the night, hasn’t felt the need to drown out their sounds, and the panic catches him right in the chest, and then, worse by far, the hope.

He sits outside all night, drinks and paces, restless and at more than one point almost hysterical, going over in his head how backwards it seems, to have felt fear because the wolves left, to hope just because the wolves left. Like there aren’t any other reasons they may have moved on, now, after so long here. The trouble is he cannot bring himself to believe, to even properly consider, a single one of them. Perhaps he has gone mad.

~

She could not, if asked, tell how many days she walked, how often she stopped, how many of those days she remembered who she was. It’s a blur, melds into all the time in this land she does and does not recall. She could not tell, if she wanted to, when it happened that she was no longer traveling alone.

She could not tell, if she wanted to, where she is, when she gets there, but all the same she knows this place. It hurts, like other places she’s gone through, but nothing like she knows her destination will hurt. She thinks - there is a vague memory of happiness here, which throws her more than anything else.

~

He cannot recall the first time he saw her.

He will not ever, ever, be able to forget the moment when his eyes meet hers again.


End file.
